Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley and her family fled their native country of Liberia after suffering tremendous privations and violence during the bloody Liberian Civil War in 1991. These poems are more than the story of one woman who carried her children over dead bodies, walking dozens of miles from Monrovia, through dirty streams amidst government soldier and rebel killing fields, fleeing bombs and constant gun battles, who with her husband and small children were forced to survive on roots in a displacement camp outside Monrovia, where they witnessed every kind of crime against women. Jabbeh Wesley did more than survive. She helped other women. She wrote.

Praise Song for My Childrencelebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century.Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility.

Poetry, Short Stories, Nonfiction, Photos, Art and Book Reviews by Daniel Barnum-Swett, Tony Barnstone, Austin Bennett, Kimberley Blaeser, Chris Bullard, .chisaroakwu., Stewe Claeson, Chard DeNiord, Ty Dettioff, Richard Dinges, Anita Endrezze, Michele Feeney, Courtney Felle, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Jerry Gates, Julia Mary Gibson, Jenn Givhan, Joy Harjo, Elizabeth Hellstern, Sandra Hunter, Richard Jackson, Patricia Spears Jones, Whitney Judd, Sarah Kaminski, Barry Kitterman, Joan Larkin, Angela LaVoie, Sara Levine, Jennifer Martelli, Tim Miller, Patricia Colleen Murphy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Martin Penman, Samuel Piccone, Herbert Plummer, Sarah Priestman, Maj Ragain, Linsey Royce, Anele Rubin, David St. John, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, Danielle Sellers, Art Smith, Jane Hipkins Sobie, Meredith Striker, Melissa Studdard, Emma Claire Sweeney, John Tait, Shelly Taylor, Marina Tsvetayeva, Heidi Vanderbilt, George Wallace, Donley Watt, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Ann Leshy Wood

Described by African scholar and literary critic Chielozona Eze as “one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century,” Patricia Jabbeh Wesley composed When the Wanderers Come Home during a four-month visit to her homeland of Liberia in 2013. She gives powerful voice to the pain and inner turmoil of a homeland still reconciling itself in the aftermath of multiple wars and destruction. Wesley, a native Liberian, calls on deeply rooted African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to convey her grief. Autobiographical in nature, the poems highlight the hardships of a diaspora African and the devastation of a country and continent struggling to recover. When the Wanderers Come Home is a woman’s story about being an exile, a survivor, and an outsider in her own country; it is her cry for the Africa that is being lost in wars across the continent, creating more wanderers and world citizens.

In Wesley's fourth poetry collection, she continues her lyric exploration of what it means to be a survivor and an immigrant, retelling stories of a generation ruined by war and grief, and the healing that follows.

In Before the Palm Could Bloom, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley writes poems of the Liberian civil war and of the devastation it has wrought: 2000,000 dead including 50,000 children and 750,000 citizens forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries. And in poems of village life and customs, the city life of Monrovia, the rites of childhood and adolescence, Wesley records for the reader a world that has been forever changed. Wesley's poems incorporate many African voices, and range in tone from sorrow and longing, to humour and ironic wit.